Telegraph Caught Recycling Gaza War Photo to Distort Today’s Reality

Photo bias is one of the most insidious forms of anti-Israel media bias and HonestReporting has addressed a number of recent examples, including AFP/Getty and Reuters wire services. Sometimes, however, the newspapers themselves are responsible for misusing imagery.

The following story and accompanying photo appeared in the UK’s biggest selling broadsheet, the Daily Telegraph, on 17 June 2010:

Although there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza and even more aid is pouring in from Israel, the Telegraph’s photo gives the impression that Gaza is a warzone.

We weren’t convinced. Unable to locate this AP photo in searches of recent images from the wire services in Gaza, we dug a little deeper until we found the very same photo with its original caption taken on 14 January 2009during Operation Cast Lead (seen here as part of a Guardian photo slideshow).

With all of the photo images from Gaza available from the wire services on a daily basis, including those featuring well-stocked supermarket shelves and markets brimming with fresh food, why did the Daily Telegraph decide to recycle the above image?

In March 2008, we flagged The Times of London after it published a photo from Jenin and failed to tell its readers that the image was from 2002. That prompted the newspaper to admit:

It is always bad practice to publish an old photograph and allow readers to think it might be a recent one; against the background of the Middle East it is doubly so, and we were in error.

Is this latest case another attempt by a media outlet to create an inaccurate and anti-Israel bias to suit an agenda and fit the news frame of suffering Gazans? Or is it, as The Times put it, simply “bad practice”?

Either way, we don’t believe that this is acceptable journalism. Please send the Daily Telegraph your considered comments by completing its online feedback form and demanding an explanation and a similar apology to that of The Times.

UPDATE – 29 June: Within hours of the release of this communique, the Daily Telegraph has replaced the original photo with the one below showing a Palestinian tunnel worker being lowered into one of the tunnels on the Egyptian border.

I had cause to write to the Daily Telegraph editor last year, threatening to end my 50 years association with the newspaper. I was very surprised when he telephoned, and we had a fruitful discussion. However, the Mary Riddell column, coming so soon after another biased one by Peter Oborne, had me writing to Tony Gallagher again. Will he phone me?????